This year Mike Flanagan, known best for turning horror’s greatest novels into palatable limited television series for Netflix, is switching it up! His latest, The Life of Chuck, may still be a literary adaptation (of a Stephen King novella by the same name), filled with sincere monologues, overt metaphors for grief, and existential ponderings, but he has traded horror for a work of light sci-fi. It follows the seemingly unremarkable Chuck – depending on his age, played by Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay and Benjamin Pajak – from childhood to curtain call as he learns various philosophies of life from his teachers (Kate Seigel and Samantha Sloyan), grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill) and the many other lives that interlace with his own.
“I contain multitudes.” The well known Walt Whitman verse is uttered repeatedly throughout, inspiring awe in Chuck and awakening inside him multitudes, making him aware of the many interceptions of experience that flavour his world. This is why The Life of Chuck begins at Chuck’s end, not even with Chuck himself but with the multitudes – including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Rahul Kohli and Matthew Lillard – who exist in his interior world. For those still confused, think of the first chapter of the film as if it was concerning the microscopic world of the Whos of Whoville in Dr Seuss’ ‘Horton Hears a Who!’, suddenly finding their world is coming to an end. By far the most interesting chapter of the film, we see a people who have become desensitised to the endless tragedies around them, disenfranchised and disconnected from each other. However as the film zooms out to encapsulate the man himself, focusing on the origin of the phrase rather than the multitudes, Chuck’s world becomes increasingly phony.
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For those less online, the Whitman quote, and the philosophy it espouses in which each individual’s rich and complex interior life is in thanks to the lives of others, may still evoke awe. But the phrase’s memetic second life, along with the script’s constant repetition, hammers home the faux-poeticism as if being forced to revise for a post-credit test, only diminishes its power. Nor does it help that the multitudes in question aren’t all that multitudinal as the film is limited to small town American life containing adults whose careers are limited to teaching or care work and endearingly precocious suburban children. All of which fits perfectly with the sickly sweet cadence of a film so overly produced that, despite the many tragedies in Chuck’s short life, the whole thing feels utterly frictionless. The intention behind this may be to draw on Shakespearen idea of life as a stage or, at least, a Truman Show version of existential theory, but instead it offers only the forced nostalgia of a spot cream advert.
This hits on Flanagan’s entire problem, which is that for all his work concerns itself with life’s biggest questions, it’s always too busy posturing to offer anything that’s truly substantial. Not even the charismatic presence of the great Nick Offerman can add the desired extra depth. Despite all its layers The Life of Chuck is nothing more than a set of Russian nesting dolls made entirely of borrowed brilliance.